Women Farmers Slam Govt For Not Addressing Their Issues

Women farmers on Thursday lashed out at government over the perceived lack of attention paid to their problems.

They said that government’s inaction has negatively impacted the development of domestic production, and called on the relevant government institutions to take steps to enable them to boost their output levels through a proper marketing system.

According to women farmers, the government has not focused on the agricultural development process over the past fifteen years despite them having proved their worth in the agriculture sector.

Security threats, lack of proper land and the lack of support to them from government are apparently their main challenges.

They called on government to step up efforts to bolster their sector and provide them with modern farming mechanisms.

“We did not have a good harvest during the recent years due to water shortages,” said an Afghan woman farmer Tahira Sakhi Zada, citing one example.

“Products are being imported on a large scale from abroad, the trend has damaged the local markets,” another farmer Fawzia Bakhshi said.

Meanwhile, officials from the ministry of agriculture have pledged that the ministry is planning to provide technical and financial assistance to at least 41,000 farmers across the country in an attempt to help them cultivate produce of higher quality.

“We struggle to make sure that our products are produced with the best quality, secondly we need public cooperation in putting our produce on local markets. People must buy domestic products to help women farmers,” Lotfullah Rashid, spokesman for the ministry of agriculture said.

Based on statistics, overall, 44 percent of agriculture is in the hands of women farmers in villages across Afghanistan.